Dr. Wingspan, I Presume

Here in the West, we have pioneered all sorts of marvelous medical techniques and equipment that have enabled doctors to perform feats of healing that would have seemed utterly miraculous a generation or two ago. Everthing from arthoscopic surgery to MRIs and countless other advances in medicine have vastly improved the standard of our lives by enabling doctors to diagnose and treat ever more diseases and injuries with less and less adverse consequences to the patients.

In China, for all of its astonishingly swift emergence as a modern society, still does a few things the old fashioned way. Or, at least, the hands-on way. In the same week that it was announced that a species of dolphin indigeonous to the Yangtze river has, it appears, passed into extinction, China's finest veterinarians pulled out all the stops to extract pieces of plastic from the stomach of two dolphins in a Bejing aquarium. When the tools of the trade failed them, they made the leap in logic any of us would have followed: use your local resources. Fortunately, the local resources included the tallest man in the world:


So what can the world's tallest man add to the effort to save the life of the dolphins? Why, the world's longest arms, of course. As CNN reported it:

Chen Lujun, the manager of the Royal Jidi Ocean World aquarium, told The Associated Press that the shape of the dolphins' stomachs made it difficult to push an instrument very far in without hurting the animals.

People with shorter arms could not reach the plastic, he said.

"When we failed to get the objects out we sought the help of Bao Xishun from Inner Mongolia and he did it successfully yesterday," Chen said. "The two dolphins are in very good condition now."

Photographs showed the jaws of one of the dolphins being held back by towels so Bao could reach inside the animal without being bitten.

As if this fellow's life wasn't weird enough already.